A party in search of purpose

By Shaun CarneyApril 13 2002

The heartfelt and inventive submissions to Bob Hawke and Neville Wran proposing all manner of reforms to the Labor Party are piling up; more than 100 have already been lodged and the deadline extends until the end of May.

But Hawke and Wran, entrusted with marshalling the ideas and producing reform proposals of their own, have one hard decision to make at the outset that has nothing to do with problems inherent in the Labor Party organisation.

They must decide just how much Labor's desultory performance at last November's federal election was the result of the party structure and how much it owed to the leadership of Kim Beazley.

This will be particularly difficult for Hawke, whose personal affection for Beazley is well documented, but it will have to be done if the Hawke-Wran review is to be of any value.

The key question confronting the Labor Party now is: has the ALP machine broken down or did the federal leadership simply choose not to operate it between 1998 and 2001? In other words, was Labor's pathetic showing merely a passing phenomenon, along with Beazley's leadership?");document.write("

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The overriding strategic goal during Labor's second term in opposition was to fall into office on the back of the Howard Government's perceived mistakes. History reveals the strategy as fatally flawed because once the government was able to create an environment in which it was seen to be mistake-proof - which happened with the Tampa "crisis" - Labor was robbed of what little political momentum it had gathered.

Beazley's failure to set out and argue for an alternate vision in the three years after Labor's predictable 1998 defeat ate away like acid at the party's electoral base.

New trade union research reflects the problem. It suggests working people actually felt more inclined to vote ALP when the party highlighted its attachment to so-called ordinary voters not through the promotion of "bread-and-butter" issues but through its willingness to defend their interests.

If that sounds airy-fairy, it's supposed to. It was the intangible stuff - the rhetorical settings, the pugnacity of Labor's approach - that provided the appeal.

But the research also showed that once Labor tried to minimise the differences between itself and the Liberals as part of its "small target" strategy, many workers changed their minds.

Someone who has seen the research put it this way: "Once the Labor Party stopped identifying itself with the notion that it was generally standing up for ordinary people and just wanted to concentrate on delivering in a couple of areas like education and health, the voters just said 'well, we'll go for the other mob because they give us lower interest rates'. In an auction with the Libs, Labor will always lose because the Libs do the greed thing much, much better. In some respects, it's unashamedly what they're about."

But even if the Hawke/Wran committee makes the leap and concludes that much of Labor's poor showing was caused by failures at the parliamentary leadership level, the fact remains that Simon Crean has declared he wants the party to "modernise", so there will have to be a reform program.

But whatever that reform program is - and this has been mostly overlooked in the debate over Labor's new direction - its chief requirement is that it will have to be acceptable to Crean. There is no way that Hawke and Wran will produce a series of proposals that will do anything but enhance Crean's influence and standing in the party.

Just what Crean wants is not clear. It would seem that, for public relations reasons if nothing else, he would not say "no" to a reduction of the 60/40 rule. This is the rule that prevails in several ALP state branches, notably Victoria and New South Wales, which guarantees affiliated unions 60 per cent of the places at state party conferences. The rule quickly became a bogey in public discussion of what was wrong with Labor's organisation following the 2001 election.

A reduction to 50/50 would seem to be the type of political compromise that marked the careers of Hawke and Wran. It would give Crean something to sell to the wider electorate, or at least to those who are presumed to be demanding that he "tame" his party.

But it will not be easy to convince union leaders to accept the change.

Leaders from the left and right wings of the Labor movement point out that, apart from industrial relations policy issues, they virtually never act monolithically. Votes from the unions split along left/right lines, just as do votes from other sections of the party.

And the proposition that Labor is in the exclusive grip of unreconstructed Marxists still fighting the class war seems to have some holes. The biggest union in the ALP is the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association. The SDA exerts considerable influence on the right of the party and commands a large chunk of votes on the national executive. Its federal secretary is Joe de Bruyn, a conservative Catholic whose social agenda is much closer to John Howard's than Simon Crean's.

The SDA has an enormous membership so it must be doing something right. But if there is one union that could not be considered an imminent threat to capitalism through its militant policies, this is it.

Union resentment at some of the comments by Labor MPs about the need for the ALP to diminish the prevalence of union representation within the party is high and getting higher.

One union leader said this week: "It would be nigh on impossible to find one Labor MP who has managed to secure either their preselection or their electoral victory without help from one or several unions. It is rich, to say the least, for them to turn around and say we should now be cut loose."

But how does Labor recast itself? Something is clearly wrong. Its primary vote last year was the lowest since the 1906 election.

Other proposals include the system of themed branches, which would bring together party members with a common interest in specific policy areas, and the use of primaries, along the American model, to preselect candidates.

The one thing that no number of reviews can instill in a political party is drive and passion. What has happened to the ALP in the past 20 years is that in many cases the individuals who have cared most about the party have been those with parliamentary ambitions.

This has tended to result in smarties and cynics, obsessed with not upsetting the applecart - that is, not challenging all the clever-clever orthodox campaigning strategies and thus not harming their personal career goals - prevailing within the party.

Their greatest period of influence was in 1998-2001, when they captured the ALP. It was also the Labor faithful's worst moment.